Los Angeles SocImages Meet Up this Sunday!

Gwen Sharp, Caroline Heldman, and I will be at The Escondite (downtown L.A.) on Sunday, March 4th starting at 6pm.  All ages.  Food and drink.  Great company guaranteed.

Please RSVP to socimages@thesocietypages.org.  Thanks to Dolores R. for picking the place!  And, yes, she’ll be there too!

SocImages News:

Sociological Images has been awarded a Public Sociology Award from the Sociology Research Institute at the University of Minnesota!  Thanks so much to our nominators, the professors who support us, and to our readers who make it all worthwhile!

I have a new paper out tracing 30 years of academic debate about female genital “mutilation” (full text). I try to tease out the constructive and destructive parts of the discussion, closing with some observations about how these lessons translate to other topics.

Ben Martin put together a nice interview, hoping to help advertise my talks at Harvard University later this semester.  Meanwhile, Yale student Anya Grenier did a nice follow up piece to my visit there.

And, well shucks, Gwen Sharp and I are among the top 50 sociologists on Twitter.

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Gwen and I will both be visiting the University of Minnesota to accept our award.  That fun day will be Apr. 20th, during the annual Sociology Research Institute.

I’m also looking forward to giving talks at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Mar. 27), Boston University,  (Mar.  27 and 28), Harvard (Mar. 26 and 28), Dartmouth (Mar. 29), and Indiana State University (Sept. 17-19).  If you’re in town, I would love to meet you! Details here.

New Pinterest Boards:

I admit, I’m a little bit in love with our Pinterest page.  New this month:

• The Great Recession
• Comics and Cartoons

Best of February

Our hard-working intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month.  Here’s what she found:

• Jay  Livingston, Christian Privilege: Santorum Tries to Woo the Jews
• Lisa Wade, Defining Women’s Oppression: The Burka vs. the Bikini
• Dan Rose, The Economics of Disease Prevention and Treatment
• Celia Emmelhainz, The Rhetoric of Luck Among the 99%
• Gwen Sharp, Embodying Gender Differences
• Lisa Wade, Fox News Versus the Netherlands

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Gwen and I and most of the team are also on twitter:

• @lisadwade
• @gwensharpnv
• @familyunequal
• @carolineheldman
• @jaylivingston
• @wendyphd

On this second-to-last day of Black History Month, let us return to posts past.

We have been urged to celebrate Black History Month…

• …with fried chicken and collard greens.
• No really, with fried chicken and collard greens! (pictured)
• …by relaxing our hair and drinking kool-aid.
• …by conflating them with “underprivileged” people.
• …with a “Compton Cookout” complete with blackface and nooses!
• …by buying stuff from companies that do nothing but acknowledge Black History Month.

<sarcasm> Good times. </sarcasm>

My Occidental College colleague, politics professor Caroline Heldman, snapped this photograph of a billboard on an L.A. freeway.  It suggests that one may celebrate Black History Month by calling 1-800-GET-THIN.  The billboard is another stunning example of the trivialization of black history by companies using it only as an excuse to market their product or service.

On the heels of our guest post describing the surprising rise in hypersexually-objectified women on the cover of Rolling Stone, comes troubling research out of cognitive neuroscience, sent in by Dolores R.

Mina Cikara and colleagues did a series of experiments — using Implicit Association and fMRI — to test whether sexist and non-sexist men’s cognition varied when looking at sexualized versus non-sexualized images of women. In fact, when men who tested high on a scale of sexism were shown images of sexualized women, they associated them more easily with words that implied an objectified “thing” than a thinking “person.” This was reflected in the fMRI study.

The take home message? When sexist men are exposed to strongly sexualized messages, they are inclined to dehumanize women, to see them as things.  Seeing someone as a thing is the first step towards treating her like her desires, thoughts, and preferences do not exist (because objects don’t think).  In other words, it facilitates sexual assault.

So… hmmmm… who to pick on here.  How about American Apparel…

American Apparel, this is brain poison (after the jump; NSFW):

(more particularly egregious American Apparel Ads here)

For more on American Apparel, see our post on leftist balkanization and the difference between modeling clothes and modeling one’s body.

In his book, Great American City, sociologist Robert Sampson argues that, while the effects of macro factors like poverty and political neglect on individual lives are well-documented, other local mechanisms matter too.  It’s important, then, to think about the constitution of neighborhoods.

Along these lines, he argues, even if a community is economically- and socially-marginalized, an existing neighborhood organizations can make a big difference.  He takes natural disasters as a case study.  A neighborhood organization can spread the news of an impending disaster, establish leadership, and organize assistance before, during, and after a crisis.  In this way, Sampson brings together micro, meso, and macro forces shaping the impact of disaster.

Here’s another one for our collection of instances in which we describe light tan as “nude,” “skin-,” or “flesh-colored” (symbolically erasing the existence of people without light tan skin).  Yahoo’s OMG! describes uses the word “nude” to describe the color of Lil’ Kim shirt.

It’s always particularly amazing when they use the word to talk about something a black person is wearing.  Like, um, Michelle Obama.

For more examples, see our posts on products designed for white people, the widespread use of such language to describe light tan in the fashion world,  and lotion marketed as for “normal to darker skin.” See also our Contexts essay on race and “nude” as a color.

For contrast, see this post about how the generic human in Russian cartoons is colored black instead of white.

The New York Times recently ran an  interesting story on prison cemeteries in Texas.  For about $2,000, the state buries about 100 inmates a year. They die of lethal injection, old age, or illness, but they’re all dressed in dark pants, a white shirt, and tie, and are buried with a prayer from the prison chaplain.

When inmates die in custody, their bodies are sometimes unclaimed.  This may be because they have no family at all, or their family members don’t wish to claim the body.   Other times the inmate is cared for by family members who simply can’t afford to bury the person themselves.  So, occasionally the family members will decline to claim the body, but show up on the day of the burial to pay their respects.

Paula F. sent in a link to Babble.com’s list of the top 100 ‘mom blogs’ of 2011.  Mom blogs have become wildly popular in recent years as a way to document and comment on the experience of motherhood, and this particular list illustrates some interesting things about social privilege.  Paula was struck by the lack of racial diversity among the selected blogs and noted how women of color are vastly underrepresented.   For example, only 7 of the blogs are written by African-American moms, and 4 of those refer to the mother’s race in the title (although the same is not true for any of the blogs written by white women).

A quick review of the blogs reveals some other interesting issues related to social privilege and motherhood.  In addition to the lack of racial diversity, the blogs included in the list show very little variation in terms of class, sexuality, age, and marital status.   (The blogs were chosen by a panel of “experts” that took into consideration nominations from Babble readers, so it’s unclear how representative they are of mom blogs in general.)

While there is the more obvious privilege of the “digital divide,” or the disparate access that people have to technology and the internet, there is also privilege in having the spare time to devote to intensive writing/blogging and the connections necessarily to draw sponsorship and advertising.  Moreover, while some of the selected blogs do offer narratives that deviate from traditional ideas about mothering and motherhood (for example, several blogs discuss mental health issues, the struggles of parenting, and forming blended families), they nonetheless reproduce a narrow image of who mothers are, what they look like, and what they do.

 ————————

Christie Barcelos is a doctoral student, a mom, and a blogger, but not really a mom blogger.